Red Pottage Part 59

"I know that he was a kindly, gentle-natured man, and that he died a hard and bitter one," said the Bishop. "G.o.d knows what is in that letter, but your husband said it would be of the greatest comfort and a.s.sistance to you in a difficulty which he foresaw for you. I will leave you to read it."

And he left the room.

The early December twilight was creeping over everything. Lady Newhaven took the letter to the window, and after several futile attempts succeeded in opening it.

It ran as follows:

"It is irreligious to mourn too long for the dead. 'I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me'--II. Sam. xii. 23. In the meanwhile, until you rejoin me, I trust you will remember that it is my especial wish that you should allow one who is in every way worthy of you to console you for my loss, who will make you as happy as you both deserve to be. That I died by my own hand you and your so-called friend Miss West are of course aware. That 'the one love of your life' drew the short lighter you are perhaps not aware. I waited two days to see if he would fulfil the compact, and as he did not--I never thought he would--I retired in his place. I present to you this small piece of information as a wedding-present, which, if adroitly handled, may add to the harmony of domestic life. And if by any chance he should have conceived the dastardly, the immoral idea of deserting you in favor of some mercenary marriage--of which I rather suspect him--you will find this piece of information invaluable in restoring his allegiance at once. He is yours by every sacred tie, and no treacherous female friend must wrest him from you.

"NEWHAVEN."

Lady Newhaven put the letter in her pocket, and then fainted away, with her fair head on the window-ledge.

CHAPTER L

"There cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is."

The Bishop's sister, Miss Keane, whose life was a perpetual orgy of mothers' meetings and G.F.S. gatherings, was holding a district visitors' working party in the drawing-room at the Palace. The ladies knitted and st.i.tched, while one of their number heaped fuel on the flame of their enthusiasm by reading aloud the "History of the Diocese of Southminster."

Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in her brother's house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem, as a rule, to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them, but her heart was where her treasure was--namely, in her escritoire, with her list of Bible-cla.s.ses, and servants' choral unions, and the long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had started.

When she had been up to Hester's room, invariably at hours when Hester could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel's sledge-hammer subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them, while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.

She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened.

Certainly she never observed anything else.

So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions, whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop's study beneath, waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.

If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he went without it.

Rachel watched the sun set--a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.

"Good-bye, good-bye," she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on the last day of December, when life had been difficult--how difficult!

"If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish for," she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend, because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.

"A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live for," she said to herself. "Now this newcomer, this man whom I have known barely six months, fills my whole life. Are other women as narrow as I am? Can they care only for one person at a time like me? Ah, Hester! forgive me, I can't help it."

Hugh was coming in presently. He had been in that morning, and the Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea. Rachel did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a good deal of Hugh.

Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers by us, loth to depart.

At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.

Would Hugh's coming ever become a common thing? Would she ever be able to greet him without this tumult of emotion, ever be able to take his hand without turning giddy on the sheer verge of bliss?

The servant announced, "Lady Newhaven."

The two women stood looking at each other. Rachel saw the marks of suffering on the white face, and her own became as white. Her eyes fell guiltily before Lady Newhaven's.

"Forgive me," she said.

"Forgive you?" said Lady Newhaven, in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "It is no use asking me for forgiveness."

"You are right," said Rachel, recovering herself, and meeting Lady Newhaven's eyes fully. "But what is the use of coming here to abuse me?

You might have spared yourself and me this at least. It will only exhaust you and--wound me."

"You must give him up," said Lady Newhaven, her hands fumbling under her c.r.a.pe cloak. "I've come to tell you that you must let him go."

The fact that Hugh had drawn the short lighter, and had not taken the consequences, did not affect Lady Newhaven's feelings towards him in the least, but she was vaguely aware that somehow it would affect Rachel's, and now it would be Rachel's turn to suffer.

Rachel paused a moment, and then said, slowly:

"He does not wish to be let go."

"He is mine."

"He was yours once," said Rachel, her face turning from white to gray.

That wound was long in healing. "But he is mine now."

"Rachel, you cannot be bad all through." Lady Newhaven was putting the constraint upon herself which that tightly clutched paper, that poisoned weapon in reserve, enabled her to a.s.sume. For Hugh's sake she would only use it if other means failed. "You must know that you ought to look upon him as a married man. Don't you see"--wildly--"that we _must_ marry, to put right what was wrong? He owes it to me. People always do."

"Yes, they generally do," said Rachel; "but I don't see how it makes the wrong right."

"I look upon Hugh as my husband," said Lady Newhaven.

"So do I."

"Rachel, he loves me. He is only marrying you for your money."

"I will risk that."

"I implore you on my knees to give him back to me."

And Lady Newhaven knelt down with bare, white outstretched hands.

(Tableau number one. New Series.)

Rachel shrank back involuntarily.

"Listen, Violet," she said, "and get up. I will not speak until you get up." Lady Newhaven obeyed. "If I gave back Hugh to you a hundred times it would not make him love you any more, or make him marry you. I am not keeping him from you. This marriage is his own doing. Oh! Violet, I'm not young and pretty. I've no illusions about myself; but I believe he really does love me, in spite of that, and I know I love him."

"I don't believe it," said Lady Newhaven. "I mean about him. Not about you, of course."

"Here he is. Let him decide," said Rachel.